We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Thursday, January 31. 2013

In a marathon session yesterday, politicians allowed people from Newtown and various other lobbying organizations to state their views about guns. Several of the more emotionally compelling statements made the press and have been forced on an unsuspecting public, as a means to push harsher gun control laws. One statement in particular struck me as I watched the news this morning. Susie Ehrens, whose daughter survived the attack, made the following plea:

“We stop being the world’s greatest country when we allow our most vulnerable citizens to be slaughtered because we might offend people by taking away their guns. We stop being something to be proud of when we love our guns more than we love our children.”

It is heartfelt sentiment with a strong statement. I have no doubt many people, many parents in particular, were moved closer to supporting gun control as a result. Certainly, it is a statement which hit me hard - do I really love guns more than I love children? So much so that I'm willing to let children die just because I support the freedom to bear arms?

Of course not. After thinking about this statement, I believed a response was needed. Mainly because it is factually inaccurate, at least in terms of how it describes me, and it is logically flawed, in general.

Let me begin by saying that I, as well as all of Maggie's readers, are deeply moved by the loss these families suffered. By no means would anyone here seek to diminish that or belittle the feelings these people are sharing.

That said, after the grieving there must be logic informing how we review these events. I am sure many gun-owning parents might be offended by Ehrens' statement. But we all have a right to be offended, so getting angry is only going to make Susie look good and reasonable to the misguided folks who support "the cause".

As a result, I wondered what I could say about the testimony provided. The main thing that came to mind is that people who are emotionally compromised should be allowed to speak, but their views should be taken with a grain of salt, and their testimony be considered less impactful simply because it's less likely to be rational and more likely to be emotional.

When we engage emotional outbursts, even if those outbursts are completely justified in the wake of an horrendous event like Newtown, we enter the realm of potentially compromised decision making. Oftentimes, when the death of another is the cause of an emotional incident, the immediate reaction is to point fingers and assign blame. It's entirely possible that blame will be misplaced, particularly if a tool becomes the focus of rage, rather than the individuals who used the tool irresponsibly. I cannot blame the ax Lizzy Borden used to kill her parents, after all.

The seemingly rational, in emotionally charged testimony, is glorified as heartfelt, and logical. The mistake is that being heartfelt makes it rational. In fact, it often isn't logical or rational at all.

Just because I love guns does not preclude my ability to love children. My wanting to keep the right to bear arms intact does not mean I value guns more than people. These are unconnected choices that Susie Ehrens has illogically connected. The emotional experience has informed their testimony and the fallacy is born. Their testimony is so heartfelt and so important to them, few can argue the illogic without seeming to be bloodthirsty and cruel. In fact, nothing is further from the truth.

David Wheeler, who lost his son in Newtown had his own emotional spin:

[David] told a panel that Thomas Jefferson said government was instituted to protect our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He said that those words and their order were no accident.

“The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon and a high-capacity magazine and keep them in their home is second to the right of my son to his life,” he said.

Thomas Jefferson did not put those words in that order accidentally. You can't have liberty or pursuit of happiness if you do not have a life. But the gun used in Newtown was not a military-style assault weapon. In addition, my owning one does not automatically deny another person's child a right to life at all. Wheeler, whose loss cannot be measured, has all our support and sympathy for that loss. But he employs a logic that is, again, both heartfelt and incorrect.

My point of view is that guns are important. They are not just for hunting. It has been conjectured that Admiral Yamamoto once argued against an invasion of the mainland US using an unsubstantiated quote, "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." Whether he said this or not is immaterial, the point is accurate.

More importantly, we must remember that our public officials swear to protect the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. In a sense, this is all our responsibility. Therefore, my right to own a gun is every bit as important as another person's life, regardless of Jefferson's order, simply because not owning a gun could prevent someone from undermining and overthrowing the Constitutional order, even if that threat is internal. This, in itself, is a potential guarantor of future children's rights.

Along those lines, I will leave those who gave testimony in Newtown a quote from Ben Franklin which they should consider long and hard, especially since Connecticut's already stiff gun control laws did little to prevent a tragedy.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Thoughts On A Sunday
It's SuperBowl Sunday and it's quiet around here...at least until the game starts. While my home team, the New England Patriots, aren't playing, I will be watching, rooting for the 49ers. I took care of most of the necessary...

I can't help but despise those parents. They're dancing on the graves of their own children and acting like useful idiots with no idea where this will lead. My sympathy ends when their hysteria endangers my own children.

It's not a question of hysteria, and it's only been a month and a half, hardly "months".

It's been 14 years since my (then) 39 year old brother in law died. His parents still suffer from this loss - even though he was an adult and had his own life.

I can't imagine the impact, the sorrow, and the difficulty of dealing with the loss of a child.

As I said, you're welcome to your opinion, but you have to remember in the article I pointed out it's important to not seem cruel. People do put stock in emotion - even if it does need to be tempered with logic and fact.

By dismissing them as ranting cry-babies who are unworthy of being heard or having opinion, you diminish your own argument while bolstering theirs.

For precisely this reason, I can only offer them my heartfelt sorrow at their loss, but also must inform them that while their loss is tragic, the rationale of their post-disaster decision making is still flawed and in need of review. There are many multi-clip guns everywhere, and it is sheer chance that one fell into the hands of a disturbed individual. This is horrible, but it is not because of guns that this occurred.

I'm sure Lanza, if he had access to explosives (as we all do, if we want to), would have taken a different route. Even an axe or baseball bat would have killed several people before being subdued.

People use the sheer scale of Newtown or Aurora as "the reason" for calling for gun control. But let's get rid of guns so only one person, or two, can be killed at a time. Does that make things "better"?

Maybe in terms of the overall (and non-existent) community psyche, yes. In terms of those suffering the loss, no.

So stop and think how you'd feel in the time after the loss of your own young child before you treat these people with disdain....they have suffered alot.

As for their right or need to speak, as someone in the comments section asked - I believe it's important for people to share their views. I believe after a tragedy like this, we need to heal together, even if part of that healing process is sharing ideas that have no real value, because sharing is what helps make the healing process work.

I have lost a child in a car accident and know the pain of such a lose. I feel the pain of these parents and my prayers go out to them!
Having said that, I will also say that any pretense by Liberal politicians to play this into something that allows them to strip us of our Constitutional rights is a blatant lie!
Their support of the murder of fifty million unborn children by changing their identity from child to fetus does not go unnoticed. The tears they are shedding now are not sorrow over the death of Newtons children but joy at having the opportunity to pass more laws limiting our rights!

I don't expect Newtown parents to react rationally. I can't imagine the horror of sending your kid off to school to have something like that happen. But all the gun banning, and selective choice of which weapons are "bad" is absurd.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing a government can do to prevent tragedies like this. Mental health is not that precise a discipline, though perhaps the restraints that were put on society's ability to hold someone who is mentally ill by the zealotry of the Civil Liberties people need to be reexamined.

I am deeply offended by the politicians who can't wait to "Not let a dead kid go to waste" to misquote Rahm Emanuel.

When the state police report comes out it may have some unpleasant facts about CT's mental health and police performance that have not been addressed. Better to have the victims say things about guns that no legislation can constitutionally do (and thus get the politicians off the hook) than to truely address the causes of the crime.

“The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon and a high-capacity magazine and keep them in their home is second to the right of my son to his life,” he said."

I'm sorry Mr. Wheeler for your loss. I'm saddened that a life so young is lost to a disturbed individual who misused his mother's firearms.

I am not willing to go so far as to say liberties are to be taken lightly. I would say to you that the right to own a weapon is equal to the right of your son to live a happy, healthy life. I would say to you that the real enemy are those who would create "gun free zones" creating soft targets for the disturbed, insane and antisocial. I would say to you that if one adult in your son's school had access to a weapon perhaps you would not be feeling the way you do.

I grieve with you. I understand your loss as I have lost a sister to a drunk driver wielding a 3,000 pound weapon of destruction.

I am not willing to require that all cars heavier than 1,000 lbs be banned due to the loss of my best friend. And you should not require the loss of an essential part of the Bill of Rights to avenge the loss of your son.

FBI statistics show that black and Mexican street gangs have a near monopoly on gun violence. Blacks and Mexicans also do almost all the killing of children. But the only way to stop this is heavy policing of black and Mexican neighborhoods, including widespread stop-and-frisk, essentially martial law for blacks and Mexicans. No one is willing to do this, so the killing of children as collateral damage in the drug wars will continue. Our corrupt, illegimate and lawless ruling class will try to deflect public anger from the real criminals by demonizing elderly white men at gun shows. But the killing of children will continue. Is this bllod sacrifice acceptable because the dead cildren are black and brown?

I agree with every word that "The Elephant's Child" (!) said, above. Personally, I discount a bit the logical value of statements by grieving parents. As much as I can, I empathize with them and they certainly have every measure of sympathy I can muster.

But that doen't make the case at all for compromising any other American's ability to defend hearth, home, and family. Let alone self. I truly do not understand how people conflate their own safety with mine, and my ability to protect it.

"In a marathon session yesterday, politicians allowed people from Newtown and various other lobbying organizations to state their views about guns. "

Not to be too blunt, but why? Would I have given a "responsible" veiw on trucks had I been given a platform after one crashed into our camper, breaking my back & severely injuring several of us, and killing a passenger in another vehicle?
(of course not)
There are reasons we do not take the words of those involved in events as gospel - so why should we in this case?
I pray for the parents' pain to be relieved. I hope that this horror is not visited on others.
As I was not involved in any fashion with the causes, I do not want (and will not listen to) a lecture from those injured.

I haven't read the whole article but I have to comment before I lose the thought.
We aren't loseing children because we have not banned guns. We are loseing children because we have gun free zones!
Now I will finish the article.

I think like Jess. Because something happened to me that is sensational and tragic, does not mean I am qualified as as expert in anything more than the personal grief and effect on my life, unless I happened to be an expert before the incident.

The restrictions on treating mentally ill persons is the unspoken factor in this story. The mother had apparently taken steps to have her son committed but Connecticut has very restrictive laws on mental illness.

The national tragedy of mental illness is not addressed. Families are desperate to obtain treatment for family members. The law blocks them from any reasonable action. Banning guns appears to be more acceptable to the political left in this country. Mental illness is excluded from consideration.

As a woman, I resent the idea that I should be disarmed for someone else's children. Countries with tighter restrictions on guns also have higher incidences of rape. I've had two instances, out on the road, where male drivers have tried to force me into a wreck. That's the point that I got a concealed carry permit.

And, as I always ask, the first thing Adam Lanza did was murder his mother. Please tell me what law you can pass that he would have obeyed.

...Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor.In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well-publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.

•And what exactly does “rare” mean in the phrase “rare adverse events”? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug.

Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues.

•One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them.”I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger,” he recalled. “Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it.”Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders.Paxil’s known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others.

The preceding examples are only a few of the best-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes – there are many others. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is undeniable that when certain people living on the edge of sanity take psychiatric medications, those drugs can – and occasionally do – push them over the edge into violent madness. Remember, every single SSRI antidepressant sold in the United States of America today, no matter what brand or manufacturer, bears a “black box” FDA warning label– the government’s most serious drug warning – of “increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24.” Common sense tells us that where there are suicidal thoughts – especially in a very, very angry person – homicidal thoughts may not be far behind. Indeed, the mass shooters we are describing often take their own lives when the police show up, having planned their suicide ahead of time.

So, what ‘medication’ was Lanza on?

(note: I ended the quote as a meager nod toward brevity, but it goes on, example after example, both before and after the passage quoted)

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/#9FgFQQPYXk3eWBis.99

===

...and there's this, from March 2012, by Mark Tapscott, exec editor at the Washington Times:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/379001

(i'm quoting from a point already well into telling tales of the left's most recent Potemkin Village 'public interest' theater productions)

QUOTE:

•Then there’s the national outcry against conservative Talk Radio meister Rush Limbaugh in response to his crude remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University Law student at the center of the HHS contraception coverage mandate flap.
Every major mainstream media outlet in the country has made hay reporting demands for Limbaugh’s sacking and the parade of advertisers allegedly leaving his program.

Then we learn from Legal Insurrection blogger William Jacobson that a left-wing political activist employed by Media Matters for America was the parade master waiting for Limbaugh to stumble so he could implement a program he created in 2009 for just such a purpose.

“While much of the public outcry against Limbaugh was genuine, the advertiser secondary boycott was astro-turfed by Media Matters, which initiated a pre-existing ‘Stop Limbaugh’ campaign, executed it over the first weekend of the controversy, and then hyped it and spoon fed it to the mainstream media without disclosing that a Media Matters employee was behind it all,” Jacobson reported.

But wait, there’s more.

•Remember all those “citizen protests” against the Keystone XL Pipeline that would bring oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast from Canada and create thousands of new jobs in the process? It was all planned and funded by a bunch of rich foundations and environmental activists, coordinated by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
They put it all on paper, too, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markay: “The presentation, written in 2008, describes the allocation of $7 million to environmental non-profits for tactics that include the use of the legislative and legal systems to delay or derail energy production in the United States and Canada, and to ‘raise the costs’ of energy in both nations.”

(By the way, I wonder what John D. Rockefeller would think if he knew his heirs were spending the proceeds from his work in the oil industry to destroy his work in the oil industry.)

•But the granddaddy of all modern leftist astro-turfing efforts is probably the $140 million creation of the Ford Foundation, the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute, Pew Trusts and five other big liberal philanthropic groups.
Their goal was to gain passage of McCain-Feingold, the landmark campaign finance reform. I did a good bit of reporting on this flap back in my Tapscott's Copy Desk days.

But Ryan Sager was the guy who broke the story big-time. As Sager described it in 2004:

"All of the major reform groups - Common Cause, the Alliance for Better Campaigns, the Campaign Finance Institute, the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Responsive Politics, Democracy 21 and the William J. Brennan Jr. Center for Justice - are funded by the same eight liberal foundations, and have received millions upon millions of dollars each.

"Yet, by maintaining the fiction of independence from one and other, they appear to much of the press to be a pack of scrappy underdogs sinking their teeth into the ankles of the big-money men."

The campaign inadvertently became public when video of a presentation by Pew vice president Sean Treglia to a group of journalists at the Annenberg Center let the cat out of the bag:

"The target was 535 Members of Congress and the idea was to create the impression that a mass movement was afoot, that everywhere they looked people were talking about campaign finance reform," Treglia explained on the video.

Not one of the journalists listening to Treglia challenged him on the fact he was, in effect, admitting a massive, systematic pack of lies.

Nor did any of them do what was minimally required of them as journalists, which was to write a story about Treglia's admission.

And that's why we shouldn’t credit too much genius to the lefties who create these astro-turfed wonders of public opinion manipulation.

After all, it helps when so many journalists covering American politics desperately want to believe these Potemkin villages are reality.

===

Both these quotes contain imbedded hyperlinks i did not reproduce --but you can go deeper by going to the links.

===

Just one wee straw in the wind, offered in fear that its solo note wrongfully implies any degree of rarity in kind, but a couple days ago i happened to see on TV Liz Claman, Fox biz' brainiac luscious redhead, interviewing in Davos the new CEO of Basel-based Novartis, one of the major makers of the psych meds with the hinky black box warnings noted above, and (among a great number of other red flags) one of multimillionaire investor UN Ambassador Susan Rice's major holdings. Seems the new CEO's previous engagement, before taking the top job at Novartis, was running Heinz of North America for Theresa Heinz-Kerry and husband John 'Easter Island Head' Kerry, our new, good lord a-mighty-how-does-this-end, secretary of state.

===

And for a nightcap, an little ditty from December, not especially newsworthy, just sitting in my folder and a short punchy couple paras with a pleasing graphic look and a few more details of oddly trailing-off questions:

--the article on SSRIs makes MDs prescribing seem irresponsible or/and sinister --but to accept this notion is to accept the very argument in dispute --the gun-grabber argument. The stats are roughly the same, the good, the bad, the ugly in roughly the same proportions --

When my first son was entering school, his teacher called us in for an informal meeting because he was "unruly". She admitted the entire class was unruly, and she felt they should all be medicated (I will point out this particular teacher was a liberal nutjob of the worst sort), because she felt "each year, the classes are getting more and more agitated and I believe it is a higher incidence of ADD/ADHD, so medication would be good for all kids."

My response was simple - that perhaps parents and teachers just needed to be firmer and enforce behavioral constraints a bit more emphatically.

She denied this, saying medication was better - "would you deny a diabetic his insulin?"

I told her my best friend from college is a diabetic and while insulin is part of his repertoire, he tries to use it as little as possible by altering his diet and has tremendous success with this (he's one of the most physically fit people I know). Sometimes medication is NOT the answer, just a little extra discipline and a logical approach to the issue at hand.

My nephews are autistic. At a conference on autism many years ago, a doctor spoke forcefully to the crowd to avoid medicating the kids until it represented only a last-ditch option. He stated "with ADHD we are engaging in a generations long uncontrolled experiment which may end very badly for all involved."

As a rule, I avoid medication until there is no other option. I can deal with pain, so my post-surgical painkillers sit in my cabinet until I flushed them.

So that's why all the rats in the sewers are falling asleep...just kidding.

After playing poker with a group of physicians for years, I recognized that they have not the foggiest what most the meds they prescribe do nor the side effects. They just take the word of the salesforce. Since I also have some relatives hawking phara, this info is supported from their bragging about how gullible the docs are; i.e. anything to get the patient out of the office or off the phone ASAP. Every -- and I mean EVERY -- physical complaint requires a matching med.

One of my favorite educators (a principal, then a district superintendent) insisted her students have "running around" time, finding that they behaved much better and were more alert when the school day was spelled with recess and physical ed classes. When finances are cut, those areas are the first to go.

I think BD may have a particular point of view on whether or not doctors know what they are prescribing.

My father, a surgeon, HATED the pharma reps and would never meet with them in anything but a formal office setting in which he asked the questions. He didn't feel he needed to dispense drugs just because they marketed them.

He disliked intensely the cozy relationship the reps created by buying dinners and sending other doctors on boondoggles.

But, to a degree, you may be correct. I don't know how prevalent that lack of care is. I'd say it's a small percentage of doctors (now that the pharma rules have been reformed, things have changed significantly), based on the large number I am familiar with. But I could be wrong.

The logical fallacy of each of these parents was to think that putting a "gun free zone" sign at a school would actually prevent guns from intruding into the school. It is becoming evident to me that people have been so overprotected in their lives that they actually think such action work. It is the same mentality people had thinking their 401k was going to earn 30-35 % a year and they could retire at 50. People do not adjust to reality very well nor do they wish to even visit it for a short time.

Another logical fallacy involves the area in which we suppose the grieving families to have expertise. Do they have an extraordinary insight into the terrible cost of living in a society where deadly tools are available to be used and misused? Yes, they see and feel that with a clarity I can only imagine.

Do they have an extraordinary insight into what policies and customs really make it more or less likely that a child will be killed by a gun? No. They understood nothing about that before and just as little now.

Being an expert in how much something hurts is not the same as being in expert in what caused it or how to prevent it.

PS, in other words, if we were arguing about whether it was really all that bad when a child is killed, we'd all need to see and hear the families' terrible grief to be shocked out of our complacency. But no one ever doubted that. What we did doubt was things that the grief has nothing to say about.

--well, throwing in with the grieving parents, on a personal feel-good mission against some shibboleth or another (in this case, it is true that had Adam Lanza arrived with a feather pillow to smother as many kids as he could, most of the dead would be alive now), is one thing if the policy result is at least neutral to the crime being fought.

But if the result is to make even more of the crime being fought (see the universe of statistics) --that is, to enable more than before of grief and death and tragedy across the land across time, then that is a whole different ball of wax.

Feinstein's ''let's dry up the supply of guns over time'' sounds perfectly plausible and is seductive in the extreme --because it ignores the unquantifiable number of incidents that, deterred by fear of arms, never happen. The only real question is, do the Feinstein forces really, really not understand this?

Just not seeing it. Yes, some tools can cause harm faster than others when wielded by evil or crazy people. But we're going to have a strange country if we can't allow knives or explosives for any purpose because they enable people to kill more quickly than they could with feather pillows.

Now, suppose I were nonchalant about driving drunk. If someone forced me to confront the grief of a father who'd lost his son to a drunk driver, I might be shocked into confronting the riskiness of my behavior. But there is no inherent value in driving drunk; it's just a question of whether I was closing my eyes to the risks and the severity of the consequences. The father's grief might persuade me that drunk driving was to be more assiduously avoided, or that it should result in stiffer penalties. But should it persuade me that alcohol should be banned altogether?

Shooting children already is illegal, no one needs to be persuaded that it's not behavior to be winked at, and the penalties for it already are about as severe as they come.

Naw, i think you are seeing it --but i didn't make a clear enough comment. Your nomination of the logical fallacy as the cognitive culprit is the heart of the whole disjunction. There are excluded middles everywhere, both commissions of the fallacy as well as outright breaks of the law of excluded middles.

Long/short, for the prescriptive therapies of the grieving parents and the Fiensteinians to actually result in a decrease rather than an increase in the Sandy Hook syndrome and all its lesser outbreaks, the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition would have to be doubled down and put into universal total execution.

The mere suspicion of any knowledge of the gun, a location of one, a neighbor who looks like he might know where one is hidden, all would have to result in the auto-da-fe and the torture executions of the accused as well as his/her entire family, that the seed be eradicated from this earth. Suspicion will have to enough to put any citizen in the torture dungeon, and from there the confessions will emanate, and the burnings at the stake commence.

Otherwise we're just cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Feinstein is notorious for this sort of crusade. Her advocacy of unilateral nuclear disarmament mimics her gun position, in the total denial of the existence of that law of nature known as deterrence.

That, or in her mind, or in the miraculously-coming-true fever-dreams of Kremlin and Beijing strategic thermonuclear missile force commands, it will be enough that the glowing, melted souls of Americans in heaven and hell be thoroughly miffed at them for not following our lead on the (responsible for now 68 years without major war) nuclear weapons.

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